Andrew Offutt: The Undying Wizard

“Head?” he sneered. “Strike at this head, little boy?” Thulsa Doom laughed, and the sound was not pleasant.

Only Cormac’s hand stayed the angry Brian from plunging off the boat and charging up the beach at the mage.

“Brian: already ye’ve spoke like a fool; be not twice one by acting so as well!”.

Another shout rose from one aboard Quester : “And what if that ugly skull flies grinning in the air to bounce on the ground, creature of a dead god?” It was Ros mac Dairb who challenged now, and he who shouldered forward to stand beside Cormac.

That which needed to be proved to them all was proven then by Lugh Man-hunter, though not by design. He’d been squatting, busy with something; now he straightened to reveal a strung bow and ready arrow. He aimed, lifted a whit in windless air, and loosed his shaft. The arrow sped lofting above the beach separating them from the wall of granite, and dropped-and all heard the chunk sound as the dart drove into the body of Thulsa Doom.

All saw how the wizard staggered at the impact, saw how half the feather-tipped shaft stood out from him, the width of two fingers above the cincture of his robe. All saw the death’s head tilt forward, dark eyes staring down at the arrow.

But none saw him fall, or so much as stagger the more.

And all saw him seize that slim shaft of death, and pull it from himself, broad steely tip and all, to hold it high above his head-unmarked with blood.

“You poor little fools will soon reduce me to begging for clothing, with the holes you put in this robe,” he called in a triumphant and mocking voice.

The words that rose among the watching men were quite different: “Gods preserve!” and “Behl protect and Crom defend!” and “Fire of Life!” Many too was the hair that strove serpent-like to depart its mooring place on a horripilating scalp.

“Be ye impervious to arrow or no, I stay with Cormac mac Art,” Lugh shouted, though in truth there was a quaver buried deep in his voice.

“I remain!” Ruadan mac Mogcorf called out.

“I stay with Cormac!” Laig mac Senain shouted, and the navigator stepped forward to join the others at the prow.

Others called out the same, and who was to say whether their cries lacked total steadiness or conviction? Osbrit of Britain started forward-

And then a rumble came from the clear sunny sky. A startled Wulfhere first glanced up, then bellowed out his laughter.

“Odin and the Hammerer declare for mac Art!”

But the words that issued from the mouth of the man alone at Quester’s stern were in Cormac’s language, not Wulfhere’s. “…and cast darkness over him,” Bas said, aloud now, “and smite him with the fire from the sky that shrivels even the oak-and turns bone into dust!”

Again the skies grumbled. Clouds, though not dark, billowed wildly in elemental madness.

“Fools, fools all!” the skull-face shouted. “BE fools then, and DIE like fools-for none of ye shall leave this island ALIVE!”

Two phenomena, at once natural and yet not natural, came together. Wulfhere would claim for the One-eyed Allfather the one, while Bas knew whose pleas, to Behl had brought it. As for the other-all knew it was the work of Thulsa Doom, old before sunken Atlantis rose.

Simultaneously, wind came screaming in from seaward to send hair streaming and whipping at shocked, paling faces-and from a dark cloud that suddenly appeared above, a yellow-white bolt of lightning slashed down at Thulsa Doom.

Thulsa Doom vanished, and none knew whether before the bolt arrived or after; whether he had escaped or been riven by the god-fire that sent dust and pebbles and great shards of sundered rock tumbling down onto the beach from where the mage had stood.

Chapter Sixteen:

The Wizard’s Power

Sea and sky went mad.

The wind came shrieking in from the southwest with a force to hurl sand up into swirling clouds like fine dust and to tear the sails of any so foolish as to spread them. Mighty waves rushed viciously in to shore, hissing and roaring as they tumbled over one another in spectacular spumes of spray. Foaming water struck with crashes as of solid matter against the granitic seawalls that towered on either end of the small area of sandy strand. Wind-thrust sea came racing up the beach in a hurtling foaming insanity of angry water. Beached like helpless sea-turtles, the two ships rocked and shuddered with groans of tortured timbers despite their being drawn well ashore.

In that mad melee of motion and ear-battering cacophony of noise, one sound reigned supreme over all others; the wind. The forces of nature ruled, and the wind was High-king.

The wind’s howl transcended the sea’s rushing hiss and roar. It was the wind that drove the sea like an unwilling stallion. The wind was god; the gale from the ocean was prime mover in this savage flaunting of nature’s elemental powers. Its sustained shrieking was as if boasting its awareness of a transcendent supremacy.

Air and water pounded the earth. Behind a grey sky, the sun’s fire was dimmed as though even Behl was powerless.

Farther and farther up the sand the waters made their incursion. And then the water eddied, shivered while it paused as though confused, confounded by a source of enforced movement not of itself. Its anger was more than apparent, yet was not enough. The sea that had swallowed so many lives was powerless. The wind controlled; the sea could only be driven. Now those waters hesitated in their greedy landward lunge. The water shuddered. It began moving along the strand- sidewise .

Westward the bubble-strewn foam moved, now. Proving its insanity or at the least its capricious whimsy, the wind had shifted through many degrees. No longer did it scream its way from the southwest. Now it was from east by southeast it emanated, still blowing in to shore that no ships might leave, and it howled the while like a thousand banshees of Eirrin come to harry the living with warnings of inexorable death.

Despite its natural, gravity-dictated inclination to slip back from the strand’s upward slope, the water was forced westward by the prodigious force of the gale.

More sea came to shore, sluicing in a defiant flood up the beach, and side by side the long boats from Eirrin and Britain rocked dangerously. For the sea they had been constructed; of the sea they were, more than of man, who had made them to further his pretense of conquering the domain of Manannan mac Lyr; landbound those craft were now, but surrounded by tugging extensions of the sea like foam-shot tentacles lapping and splashing all about them.

With a creaking of stout wood and a constant shifting of cargo, the vessels seemed full striving to resume their natural abode. The wind thrust at them. The water coaxed and tugged.

The craft of Britain was of less heavy construction and more buoyant as well, owing to the fact that Quester alone had been laden from the inland castle’s trove. Dead Bedwyr’s vessel shifted. It slid slightly crabwise with the gale-driven waters that rushed around it and broke over its stern in spectacular leaping gouts of white spray. The ship of Eirrin but rocked, and groaned as though in pain or frustrated desire to join its partially floating comrade.

The gale shouted down the creaking complaints of straining wood.

Nature rampaged in chaotic motion and sound and sky-darkening anger.

But it was not Nature, nor yet again the gods, that provided catalyst and control of this demonstration of enormous elemental force.

No deity was Thulsa Doom of eighteen millenia’s lifespan, nor was he natural, of Nature, the dead man who was not dead. And it was Thulsa Doom who controlled, who conjured and sent wind and challenging sea onto land. Thulsa Doom had not threatened, but promised, and the undying wizard kept his promise. None on the accursed isle of Kull’s abandoned castle thought this horror of natural force with a berserker rage upon it was of else than Thulsa Doom.